General thoughts on why Mark was successful

• I think his experience with Synapse is partially responsible for the aggressiveness with which he expanded Facebook.  I think it primed him to be ready to exploit an opportunity where he could grow an app into something he could sell for a lot of money.  I think if he hadn't had that experience, he might have been more lax about growing Facebook.
• FB was created to solve a problem all students at Harvard had.  It wasn't just a dating site, where only people looking for a partner would have a reason to join.  Everyone could feel comfortable joining it and get value from it.
• Although he says he built the first version of Facebook in a week, it's important to understand that he had built at least two websites prior to that: Facemash and his network-visualization site.  So it's not like he was learning how to build a web app for the first time while he was creating Facebook.

General Links

• FirstVersions - Facebook
  
  • 2004: 
    • https://www.quora.com/What-features-did-the-first-version-of-Facebook-have
      

      • According to Facebook's first technical executive, Adam D'Angelo, there were only eight features when the site launched. D'Angelo wrote about them on his platform, Quora.

      • They are:

        • User accounts (with real names required), restricted to @harvard.edu email addresses

        • Friends, including friend requests

        • Invitations (no contact importer; you had to enter each email address individually)

        • Profiles, with a single photo for each user

        • Ability to list user metadata like gender, birthday, dorm, phone number, favorite music, favorite books, "about me," courses (structured)

        • Search by name, class year, courses, other metadata

        • Some privacy restrictions to limit who could see your profile (friends only, only people in my class year)

        • A feature to visualize a user's friend graph, which was later cut

      • Features that were not included:

        • Messages

        • The wall

        • Status updates

        • Photos beyond the single profile pic

        • Groups

        • News feed - the home page was mostly wasted space which would show site-wide announcements, friend requests, and pokes.

        • Notifications (nothing happened except for friend requests and pokes)

        • Events/parties

        • Notes

  • 2005: 
  • 2006:  
  • 2007: 
• FaceMash (recreation)
• UWisconsin - The Zuckerberg Files
• Harvard Crimson articles
  • You can just do a search on google for "site:https://www.thecrimson.com/ 'thefacebook.com'" or "site:https://www.thecrimson.com/ 'zuckerberg'" and limit results to 2003 to 2005.

Date-specific links

• 2003.10.23 - Harvard Crimson - Not-so-artificial Intelligence
  • Seven months after its September 2002 release, the online technology newsgroup slashdot.org ran an article about the program. Almost immediately, Synapse was fending off calls from WinAmp, Windows Media player, Moodlogic and MusicMatch.
    • It's interesting to me that it took seven months before it went viral.  That kind of delayed reaction seems to be the norm for things that are released without any aggressive marketing campaign.
  • “One of the companies offered us $950,000 but wanted us to go work for them for 3 years,” Zuckerberg says. “We wanted to go to college, so we said no.”
  • To ensure that they weren’t going to be taken advantage of, Zuckerberg and D’Angelo split the $12,000 price of a patent, confident that their company’s future profits would pay off.
• 2003.11.04 - Harvard Crimson - Hot or Not? Website Briefly Judges Looks
• 2003.11.19 - Harvard Crimson - Facemash Creator Survives Ad Board
• 2004 - Chat logs between Mark and friends
• 2004.02.09 - Harvard Crimson - Hundreds Register for New Facebook Website
• 2004.02.17 - Harvard Crimson - Show Your Best Face
• 2004.02.18 - Harvard Crimson - Harvard Bonds on Facebook Website
• 2004.03.01 - Harvard Crimson - Facebook Expands Beyond Harvard
• 2004.03.09 - Harvard Crimson - Columbia Rebukes thefacebook.com
• 2004.03.18 - Harvard Crimson - Sociology of thefacebook.com
• 2004.04.28 - CNBC - Interview with Mark Zuckerberg
  • Wow, this was very, very early in the company's history, less than three months after it launched.
  • He says they're at 100,000 users.
  • The screenshot of the home screen shows ~30 universities.
  • He says he's aiming for over 100-200 universities by the fall.
  • This interview shows some screens that aren't shown at firstversions.com.
    • User home screen
      • Left Sidebar:
        • My Contact Info(?)
        • My Personal Info(?)
        • My Picture(?)
        • My Groups(?)
        • My Friends(?)
        • My Messages(?)
        • My Account(?)
        • My Privacy(?)
      • Main section:
        • Your Friend Requests
          • You have a friend request awaiting confirmation.  To confirm, click here.
        • My Account
          • First column: Shows your profile photo
          • Second column:
            • View My Profile
            • View My Friends
            • Visualize My Friends
            • Search For People
            • Browse(?) My Network
          • Third Column:
            • You are connected to 325 people through classes.
            • You are connected to 4816 people through friends.
          • Fourth column:
            • browse them(?) (it's hard to read, seems to be a link related to the people known through classes; maybe lets you browse the 325?)
            • browse them(?) (it's hard to read, seems to be a link related to the people known through friends; maybe lets you browse the 4816?)
        • The Next Step
          • Now you can message your friends at other schools!  Click here.
    • 'Browse people' screen
      • The user seems to have arrived at this page by clicking the 'browse them' link on the user home screen that shows their friends-of-friends.
      • Left sidebar:
        • It's almost entirely cut off but I seem to see a search box.
      • Main area:
        • Top bar:
          • Searched for all people directly connected to you through friends.
            • 'directly connected' and 'through friends' are underlined, making it seem like this page was also used to handle other cases, like further-removed connections or connections through classes.
          • Displaying results 1-10 out of about 4811
            • There seems to be something on the right side, maybe links to different page numbers?
        • User row:
          • First column: The user's profile photo
            • There's a blue question mark used for people without photos.
          • Second column: User info
            • Name
            • Email
            • Status [Student or Alumnus/Alumna, looks like it was from a drop-down]
            • Year
            • Phone
            • House
            • Field [Major]
          • Third column: Available Actions
            • View Profile
            • View Friends
            • Add to Friends
            • Send Message
            • Poke Her! or Poke Him! (so I guess the app asked for your gender)
  • The user home page shows that users can already send messages to their friends at other schools.
• 2004.06.10 - Harvard Crimson - Mark E. Zuckerberg ’06: The whiz behind thefacebook.com
• 2004.09.13 - Harvard Crimson - Lawsuit Threatens To Close Facebook
• 2004.12.02 - Harvard Crimson - Having a Blonde Moment
  • On thefacebook.com, the “Women against Blonde Discrimination” group counts 84 members.
    • So very early on people were creating and joining groups.  It's not clear to me what features were available within these groups, it might have just been that you could join or leave but not chat amongst members.
• 2005.02.24 - Harvard Crimson - Business, Casual.
  • This is a really, really good article.
  • 
  • Tensions ran high this summer when Zuckerberg decided to reapportion ownership of the company, increasing Moskovitz’s share to match the work he put in. The rest of the team was shocked, but Zuckerberg says it was only fair: he says TheFacebook is just as much the overlooked Moskovitz’s project as it is his own.
  • Last July, TheFacebook fell nearly $60,000 in debt as site traffic—and advertising revenue—declined. The team faced a choice: let the investors bail them out, or stick it out alone, keeping the site student-run.
  • the lawsuit filed by three Harvard graduates for the competing ConnectU site costs TheFacebook $20,000 a month, even though the case has yet to reach discovery phase.
  • His teammates [...] have all left for the holidays, but Zuckerberg, a New York native, stayed in town.
  • Zuckerberg took a number of trips to the East Coast earlier in the semester to meet with potential investors and advertisers. He once squeezed six cities into a 10-day trip. His roommates joke about his “weekly commute to New York.”
  • Today Zuckerberg is loafing around in pajamas and a T-shirt, his typical work garb
  • He hoped to spend the summer working on Wirehog, the file-sharing offshoot to TheFacebook.
  • Zuckerberg eventually convinced him it was best for the team to stick together and work in a place that was, in Zuckerberg’s words, “kind of remote, without many distractions.”
  • “Palo Alto was kind of like this mythical place where all the techs used to come from,” he says. “So I was like, I want to check that out.”
  • It was over the summer that TheFacebook added Parker to its team. When Zuckerberg learned Parker was looking for a place to stay, he invited him to crash at Casa Facebook.
  • Zuckerberg says he looks to Parker— whom he calls “a big eye-opener”—for advice and has learned from Parker’s experiences starting two companies of his own, both of which have had relationships with investors.
  • Parker, Zuckerberg, McCollum, and Moskovitz eventually became the only full-time fall residents
  • most of the time, work took preference over parties and nice weather, says summer intern Stephen Dawson-Haggerty.
  • Zuckerberg chose to make the best of the situation. He skied with a backpack and tucked his petite Sony VAIO laptop inside. (Not unusual: without it, he says he feels naked.) When he got a call that something was wrong with the site, he skied to the base, sat down, established a wireless internet connection, and started programming.

  • TheFacebook boys had to learn to follow the business schedule. The team wakes up early to deal with the managers of the server and bandwidth facilities. Moskovitz might take a mid-morning trip to install new servers in the racks at the facility in San Jose to prepare for another expansion. Zuckerberg wakes up early in order to coordinate the advertisements that need to go up on the site that morning, since the East Coast business day ends at 2 p.m. for those on Pacific Standard Time.

    But they are also programmers following programmer mode. That means staying up until 8 in the morning programming and not waking up until it is dark.

  • as often as they can, they try to have a good time, fencing, playing paintball, going on ski trips, or hitting up parties at Stanford and Berkeley.
  • Late in the summer, their landlord sent TheFacebook boys a letter of complaint, asking them, among other things, not to throw furniture into the pool, talk outside after 10 p.m., or climb on the roof.
  • “I mean, it was never a formal decision, like, should we go back to school?” he says. “We all just kind of sat around one day and were like, ‘We’re not going back to school, are we? Nah.’”
  • Today, TheFacebook has 1.5 million users, 90 percent of whom visit the site at least once a week
  • Zuckerberg estimates he’s been to 40 meals with interested venture capitalists and representatives of other companies, like Google, to discuss investment opportunities. Nearly all of the top-tier Silicon Valley venture capital firms have expressed an interest, he says, and TheFacebook has met with most of them. The casual nature of the investor meetings makes it easy for Zuckerberg to go out for lunch, or to a concert, with or without the intention of accepting money. He enjoys the meetings, he says, out of sheer curiosity.
  • While Zuckerberg says TheFacebook plans to steer clear of venture capital firms for now, that doesn’t mean things won’t change. After all, the boys have already been tempted once—last summer, as debts piled up. Ultimately, Zuckerberg chose not to partner with a venture firm, essentially setting the company’s current investor policy. Instead, he sought advertisers, earned back the debt money he owed himself, and kept TheFacebook free of venture capitalists.
  • hiring people by, like, bringing them into your house and letting them chill with you for a while and party with you and smoke with you.
    • This is Mark describing how he hired people.
  • For six months Abrams [creator of Friendster] turned venture capitalists down, but in October 2003 he agreed to raise money from Kleiner, Perkins Caufield & Byers Capital—$13 million, to be exact. Abrams says he might have kept saying no, but at the time, so-called “copycats” were on the rise and the interest in the concept of Friendster was too hot for Abrams to handle on his own.  Abrams, who has met with Zuckerberg, sees TheFacebook reaching that crucial fork in the road.  “They have to figure out what they want to do,” Abrams says. “If they go the route with venture capital it’s gonna be like the Google guys and the Yahoo guys. The VCs are gonna hire somebody [who], you know, instead of 20 is probably [going to be] like 50 [years old] to come in and run the company."
  • Zuckerberg and D’Angelo eventually got bored with Synapse. They had stopped working on it after D’Angelo left for CalTech and Zuckerberg entered Harvard. And by the time Zuckerberg and D’Angelo decided they were ready to sell, no one wanted to buy it.

  • Advertising income exceeds their operating costs (about $50,000 monthly in server costs and salaries for eight employees, press representative Chris R. Hughes ’06 says), giving the company freedom to invest the difference back into the company to pay for things like server and personnel expansions. Advertising is planned to cover those expansion needs and nothing more.  “[If] we’re gonna need $100,000 worth of servers or $500,000 worth of new people—I don’t know if you can quantify that—and if we’re going to get this over the time frame of a year, then how much advertising do we need now? I mean, yeah, we plan based on that,” Zuckerberg explains.

  • while salaries of full-time employees are equal, ownership in the company is not. Exactly how that is divided is not something Zuckerberg will discuss. For one, he says, the pie keeps changing. The company was first divided between Zuckerberg and Saverin only. As TheFacebook added new people, Zuckerberg cut them in. The shares have also shifted to reflect increasing roles. For example, as Moskovitz took on more and more responsibilities, Zuckerberg decided to cut him a larger stake.  “Everyone else was like, ‘What the fuck are you doing?’” Zuckerberg says. “And I was like, what do you mean? This is the right thing to be doing. He clearly does a lot of work.”

  • In total, Zuckerberg says the lawsuit filed by...Connect-U could cost TheFacebook upwards of $200,000.  “But whatever, it’s just money,” he says. “We’ll just sell more ads or something.”

  • This fall, as expenses for lawyer Daniel K. Hampton, who has represented Microsoft in antitrust litigation, became problematic, TheFacebook made its first move toward outside investments. Normally investors shy away from companies facing a federal lawsuit, but Peter Thiel—co-founder of PayPal—was willing to take the risk.  Zuckerberg calls Thiel’s investment of an undisclosed sum “basically a loan” with interest and equity attached.

    • This is interesting, it makes it sound like it was the Winklevoss lawsuit that pushed Zuck to take money from Thiel.
  • Zuckerberg says the Facebook could cover every page of the website in advertisements, and make a ton of money doing it. But they don’t. Instead, this fall they rolled out a local ad system, where student groups pay approximately $15 a day to make an announcement to their school. Local announcements, of course, do not raise as much as national banner advertising. They do, however, establish a trusting relationship between TheFacebook and its users.
  • “We like school and want to go back to school and at some point somebody’s gonna offer us a lot of money and we’ll probably take it, you know?” Zuckerberg says.

  • “All the CS courses I was taking, [weren’t] that interesting,” he says. The creator of Synapse once scoffed at the C+ he received in his artificial intelligence class.

    “Part of what I’m learning in being out here—and this probably sounds like way too serious for me—is how to be a businessman,” he says. “I always pictured it like some older people who, like, take themselves really seriously and have lawyers do everything and try to like write contracts that are just really advantageous to them. And like, I’m kind of learning, that’s not it.

    “If you’re gonna be a good businessman, really what it’s about, is finding situations where people win. It’s not about tricking people into doing stuff, it’s not about being a hardass. It’s about being comfortable and working in your pajamas, because that’s gonna end up being what’s best for everyone.”

• 2005.04.14 - Harvard Crimson - Making Out Alright at Harvard
  • The ineptness of Harvard students in this regard is exacerbated by tools like thefacebook.com, which allows us to avoid getting to know anyone while simultaneously stalking them online to discover their favorite movies and books.
    • This gives a good idea of what people were using Facebook for at the time.
• 2005.10.26 - Mark Zuckerberg at Stanford
  • http://ecorner.stanford.edu/podcasts/1567/From-Harvard-to-the-Facebook
  • 8:40 - He gives a seemingly-BSish answer about why you could (at that time) only view users who go to the same school as you. He says that he made that decision to encourage sharing of information, when AFAIK another (the real?) reason is that he originally thought Facebook would just be for Harvard, and so he didn't design it to scale beyond one school, and so once it became successful the quickest way to scale it up was to just make new instances of the same app, where each instance has its own database, and for some reason it was difficult / impossible to query across instances (or they just didn't prioritize it, instead focusing on scaling to new schools).
• 2005.11.01 - Harvard Crimson - Zuckerberg To Leave Harvard Indefinitely
• 2005.12.07 - Guest Lecture @ Harvard's CS-50
  • 1:30 - Half-jokingly - "This is one of the first times I've been to a lecture at Harvard."
  • 1:40 - He says he's going to talk about how the things he learned in his classes affected his decisions when running Facebook.
  • 2:20 - He says he started off with CS121, and never took CS50.
  • 2:40 - He says, "If you're familiar with C you can pick up PHP in a day or two."
  • 2:50 - "Within a couple of weeks a few thousand people had signed up and we started getting some emails from people at other colleges asking for us to launch it at their schools."
  • 3:50 - The first really big decision that we really had to make was how to expand the architecture to go from this single-school type setup that we had when it was just at Harvard to something that supported multiple schools. This was a decision that had to be made at a bunch of levels, both in the product and how we wanted privacy to work, but I think that one really important decision that's helped us scale really well is how we decided to distribute the data. I don't know how much complexity stuff and big-O notation you do in this class...so one of the most complicated computations that we do on the site is the computation to tell how you're connected to people. You can imagine that it's stored sort of as a series of undirected, unweighted pairs of ID numbers of people in the database. Then, if you wanna figure out who's friends with someone, you have to look at all their friends. So that's maybe like a hundred or two hundred people. But then if you wanna figure out who's a friend of a friend, or what the closest connection is there, then you kind of have to look at the hundred or two hundred friends of each of those friends. So at each level there's another factor of N multiplied in, where N is the number of friends that each of your friends has, so you can see this kind of becomes exponentially difficult, to solve for the shortest path between people. So if you're just looking for a friend of a friend that's N^2, if you're looking for a friend of a friend of a friend that's N^3. That's something that traditionally was pretty difficult for a lot of the predecessor sites to Facebook, so, and for example, Friendster had large problems with this because they were trying to compute paths six degrees out, or seven degrees out....
  • 6:30 - "Now we're at six million users."
  • 11:10 - "...when you're doing a hundred million page views a day, and each page view might have like 30 to 50 queries, I mean, especially if you're doing something like a profile view that queries all kinds of different information, then that kind of starts to suck."
  • - someone asks him whether he worries about Google competing with them, and he doesn't have a great answer
  • 45:10 - "I don't think we're competing with MySpace; I think it's a different kind of application."
  • 49:40 - He says he's spent a lot of time trying to figure out how to tell which of your friends you're closer to. It's an interesting insight into how he thinks.
  • 59:80 - Very interesting insight into their expansion strategy: since they started at Harvard, they tried to expand first to schools where they figured Harvard students would most likely have lots of friends.
  • 59:50 - He talks about how his parents were very skeptical about the idea.
  • At the end he mentions three CS courses that left an impression him:
  • CS 124 - Data Structures and Algorithms - He says he learned a lot of important stuff from this one -http://www.registrar.fas.harvard.edu/co ... algorithms
  • CS 121 - Introduction to the Theory of Computation - http://lewis.seas.harvard.edu/pages/com ... omputation
  • CS 161 - Operating Systems - He says he just found this one really, really hard -http://www.eecs.harvard.edu/~margo/cs161/
• 2006.04.25 - Deposition (that's only a partial transcript)
  • 
    
    • "It was a combination of other things I had made in the past. (...) Things like Course Match, Face Mash, other websites I had made." [NW: Just like Woz and the Apple computer: Woz said that the Apple was the result of a combination of things he had learned while working on various other projects.]
  • 
    
    • "I don't know exactly. I had problems sets and other stuff going on then. My finals. So I mean the amount of time that I had would have been capped by that. I think it was somewhere between a week and two weeks or so."
    • "Q. So you wrote the code for Facebook in a period of one to two weeks before it was launched; is that right?"
    • "A. The original version, I think so."
    • (...)
    • "Q: So in January you began writing code for a February 4th launch; correct?"
    • "A: You're asking me if I began in January?"
    • "Q: Yes."
    • "A: And if it launched on February 4th?"
    • "Q: Yes."
    • "A: I think both of those are true."
    • "Q: And it took you somewhere between one and two weeks to write the initial code that you launched with; correct?"
    • "A: Yeah, I believe so." 
  •  ← On expanding to other schools in the first month.
  •  ← On the features in the first version.
    
    • "I tried to make sure that it worked in as many cases as I could test that you could register for an account, that you could build your profile, that you could search, and those were the important things. (...) Set your privacy settings so you could determine who would get to see what on the site. You could add menus. You could add courses. I mean that was part of building your profile."
  •  ← On his planning process.
  •  ← On the servers he was renting and how much they cost. (Managed.com, $85/mo)
  •  ← They had interns from Harvard work with them in Cali over the summer of '04.
  •  ← He started dating Priscilla in November of '03.
• 2009.05.10 - readwrite - Did Mark Zuckerberg’s Inspiration for Facebook Come Before Harvard?
  • This is a very interesting article that argues that Mark was probably inspired to create Facebook by his experience at his high school, where they had a book student directory that students called "the facebook" and which was turned into a website his senior year in high school.
  • Zuckerberg enrolled in the fall of his junior year and, like every new and returning student, received his own copy of Exeter’s student directory, “The Photo Address Book,” which students affectionately referred to as (you guessed it!) “The Facebook.”

  • We interviewed several of Zuckerberg’s peers this week, and they all confirmed what David W. Farrant (class of 2000) had to say:  “The front cover says “The Photo Address Book,” but we all called it “The Facebook” all the time because “The Photo Address Book” was such a mouthful. Everybody called it that.”

  • In Zuckerberg’s senior year, the student council, headed by student body president Kris Tillery, successfully lobbied the administration to have the school’s IT department put the full contents of Exeter’s Photo Address Book online. By the time Zuckerberg graduated, the website was put up at http://student.exeter.edu/facebook, with the URL directory (i.e. “facebook”) named after the students’ pet name for the physical book and effectively shortened to something useful.
    • archive.org doesn't have anything saved for the URL.
  • In our interviews, some of Zuckerberg’s peers pointed us to this screenshot of the original website hosted on the school’s .edu domain. The screenshot was posted in the public Facebook group “Exonians” in 2006 and is still there. Some of the comments about the screenshot (which date back to 2007) refer to it as “the original Facebook” and refer to the Photo Address Book as “the physical Facebook.”
  • 
• 2009.05.10 Facebook founder's roommate recounts creation of Internet giant
  
  • "Mark heard these pleas and decided that if the university won't do something about it, he will, and he would build a site that would be even better than what the university had planned," Hasit said. "Before founding Facebook, he built the site Course Match which allowed students to find out who among those living in the same dorm are taking what courses, so that they could form study groups."
    [...]
    "Mark came to me on the day he built Facebook, and he said to me, 'Arie, I built this site. I want you to sign up.' And that is how I signed up to Facebook. I put a favorite quote of mine in the profile. I specified my favorite books, which courses I take at Harvard. I uploaded one picture to the profile. There was no Wall. There was no News Feed. There weren't too many things in Facebook, which only began its lifespan on the Web.
    
    "Initially Zuckerberg asked a small group of people to sign up to Facebook. At a certain point he told us to start inviting friends, and that is what we did on the first and second day which the site went up on the Web. We could only invite students enrolled at Harvard. In fact, if you did not have a Harvard e-mail address you could not sign into Facebook. At first, dozens of Harvard students registered. The numbers then reached the hundreds, and by the fourth day it had already reached the thousands. People were very enthusiastic about the site. It enabled them to know who took what courses and to meet new people. It conquered Harvard. In less than a week, some 4,000 students signed up for Facebook."
    
    Hasit recalls how Zuckerberg spent hours in front of the computer. "He studied computers and psychology," Hasit said. "Despite the fact that he developed Facebook, he continued his studies as per usual. His grades were okay. He was even in a relationship with a girlfriend. During Facebook's initial days, the walls in his room were filled with graphs and charts which showed how many people joined on a daily basis, who used what application, and who has the most friends."
    
    "After a few weeks, he decided to open up Facebook to another university. He had two friends, one at Stanford and the other at Dartmouth, whom he asked to promote the site there. He also asked for help from his ex-girlfriend who was a student at Dartmouth."
    
    Facebook quickly attracted a following in other leading universities. "Every user specified which university he belonged to, and that was how he kept in touch with other students at the university in which he studied, but all the networks were under one Web site."
    
    "The graphs and charts in his room became graphs and charts which included statistics from all the universities. At one point he received requests from students at other universities who were not in Facebook to open the site to them as well."
  • Lessons:
    • name recognition is key; Zuckerberg gradually increased his name recognition by repeatedly producing websites that people found helpful
      • This is also what Pieter Levels is doing.
    • tracking your progress is key; you need to know what parts of your website are drawing people.
    • put important information on your walls so that you'll be more likely to look at it.
    • prioritize: don't try to include every cool feature in the first version. Just put enough in so that people will find it useful enough to keep coming back to.
    • set up your site so that the cost of joining is always very low. It should take a minute or less.
• 2011.02 - Ben Baumann - Why I Didn’t Hire Mark Zuckerberg
  • The truth is, when I interviewed Mark Zuckerberg for a part time software developer internship in 2003 at Isovera, he was a fresh faced college sophomore who was not setting out to build a multi-billion dollar company. At his interview, Zuckerberg demonstrated to me and my partner a prototype for his forthcoming website he called “Facebook,” that would serve as a kind of photo guide among Harvard students.Harvard already had a quasi-yearbook publication called Face Book, which was distributed once per year in print form. I remember thinking, “Ok, so maybe he wants to put this online.” Zuckerberg then proceeded to describe his plan to let people also “connect with their friends.” That seemed like a fine idea, but social networking was not a new concept (even in 2003!) and I didn’t see how doing this at Harvard would really produce anything other than a cool website that students might dabble with. When I questioned him about his ambitions he claimed that “if the site was successful at Harvard, maybe we’ll roll it out at Yale.” It wasn’t clear that he had any plan to make this into a serious business, and to this day, I don’t believe that he was at all aware that he was about to catch lightening in a bottle.The success of a social network is contingent on strong positive network effects. In other words, the more people who use the network, the more useful the network is to each person. While not an expert on the “business” of social networks, I didn’t see how an upstart in this space could build an audience of sufficient critical mass since MySpace and Friendster seemed to have gotten there first. After all, that’s why there hasn’t been another eBay since…, well, eBay.(...)
    
    Sure, Mark Zuckerberg was a smart kid, but did he really understand the extent to which voyeurism would play into his business model? Did he have any data to show that the social networking space was ripe for this type of product at this particular time? When Facebook came on the scene, the masses were finally starting to become receptive to social networking. In this sense, sites like MySpace and Friendster helped to pave the way. A college student himself, predisposed to the same hormonal animal instincts of his brethren audience, he was at the right place at the right time to get the ball rolling.
• 2012.05 NY Magazine - The maturation of the billionaire boy-man
  • On the existing competition, and why Facebook came out on top:
    • When Zuckerberg created "Thefacebook", there were already similar services on other college campuses. Columbia had one. Stanford had one. Yale had one. At Harvard, Zuckerberg's schoolmates the Winklevoss brothers had, famously, been trying to get one off the ground for months. Meanwhile, out in the real world, Friendster had amassed more than 2 million users. There was MySpace. There was AOL, which had established the "friend" concept almost a decade earlier with its instant-messaging system's Buddy Lists.
      
      Today, all those other social networks are effectively toast, while Facebook is closing in on 1 billion users. Why? Because Facebook has executed better.
      • I think this is an excellent question to ask: Why did Facebook succeed? Why not one of the others?
  • On Focus:
    • Most entrepreneurs are creative and impatient, an often fatal combination--trying to do too many things, they spread their tiny companies too thin. This is one trap Zuckerberg almost fell into. After moving his small Facebook team to Palo Alto in the summer of 2004, he turned much of his attention to building a file-share product called Wirehog. Facebook was going gangbusters, but Zuckerberg wasn't sure it would last; this was his hedge.
      
      Wirehog evolved into one of Facebook's first apps, but it never amounted to much. At the end of that summer, Facebook raised its first real outside capital, and Zuckerberg's focus returned. Focus became so central to Facebook's ethos that in the company's old office, the word was stenciled over a urinal in the bathroom.
• 2012.10.20 - YCombinator - Mark Zuckerberg at Startup School 2012
• 2014.09.23 - Stanford / Dustin Moskovitz - Startup advice for Stanford students
  • http://venturebeat.com/2014/09/25/how-t ... 11-quotes/
• 2017.05.26 - Facebook - Harvard Commencement 2017
  • How many of you remember exactly what you were doing when you got that email telling you that you got into Harvard? I was playing Civilization and I ran downstairs, got my dad, and for some reason, his reaction was to video me opening the email.
    
    • Lesson: It's OK to play videogames in moderation.

  • I was late so I threw on a t-shirt and didn't realize until afterwards it was inside out and backwards with my tag sticking out the front. I couldn't figure out why no one would talk to me -- except one guy, KX Jin, he just went with it. We ended up doing our problem sets together, and now he runs a big part of Facebook. And that, Class of 2017, is why you should be nice to people.

    • Lesson: Being unkempt won't necessarily doom you to failure.

  • I remember the night I launched Facebook from my little dorm in Kirkland House. I went to Noch's with my friend KX. I remember telling him I was excited to connect the Harvard community, but one day someone would connect the whole world.
    The thing is, it never even occurred to me that someone might be us. We were just college kids. We didn't know anything about that. There were all these big technology companies with resources. I just assumed one of them would do it. But this idea was so clear to us -- that all people want to connect. So we just kept moving forward, day by day.
    I know a lot of you will have your own stories just like this. A change in the world that seems so clear you're sure someone else will do it. But they won't. You will.

    • Lesson: Don't be overly intimidated by big companies. Don't always assume that they'll be able to beat you at whatever idea you have.
  • Now it's our turn to do great things. I know, you're probably thinking: I don't know how to build a dam, or get a million people involved in anything. But let me tell you a secret: no one does when they begin. Ideas don't come out fully formed. They only become clear as you work on them. You just have to get started. If I had to understand everything about connecting people before I began, I never would have started Facebook. Movies and pop culture get this all wrong. The idea of a single eureka moment is a dangerous lie. It makes us feel inadequate since we haven't had ours. It prevents people with seeds of good ideas from getting started. In our society, we often don't do big things because we're so afraid of making mistakes that we ignore all the things wrong today if we do nothing. The reality is, anything we do will have issues in the future. But that can't keep us from starting.
  • Now, an entrepreneurial culture thrives when it's easy to try lots of new ideas. Facebook wasn't the first thing I built. I also built games, chat systems, study tools and music players. I'm not alone. JK Rowling got rejected 12 times before publishing Harry Potter. Even Beyonce had to make hundreds of songs to get Halo. The greatest successes come from having the freedom to fail.

• 2017.10.08 - Zuck's FB profile - Post: AOL Instant Messenger
  • Growing up, I lived in a different town from most of the kids I went to school with.
  • A lot of my interaction with [my high school friends] was through AIM. I developed a lot of empathy for the nuances of how people expressed emotions and ideas online, and I became very focused on improving how this worked.
  • I always loved coding. I vividly remember riding home on the bus across that bridge after school thinking to myself that now I had the whole evening to build things on my computer. Fridays were the best, and I remember being even more excited because I had the whole weekend to build things.
    
    Those early projects and experiences had a lot of the seeds of what would become Facebook.
    • I hacked together a tool that let me set myself as if I'd been idle for a long time, even if I was actually at my computer.
    • I built a tool that let me send messages with the letters fading between any colors I wanted. It was simple, but it was fun to build and it made my messages look different.
    • One day my dad saw me using AIM and asked if I could set it up in his office so he could communicate with the other dentists and hygienists. I told him I didn't think AIM was ideal and since he controlled the network in his office I could make him something better.  I built him a system I called ZuckNet that he used for many years afterwards. In addition to chatting one-on-one, he could broadcast an update to everyone in the office at the same time. It also saved every message you received so you wouldn't lose them when you closed your chat window, and it queued up messages to be delivered later if a person wasn't online at the time. Everything was encrypted so sensitive information could be secure. These were all features that solved pain I felt using AIM.
• 2019.02.04 - The Atlantic - Before It Conquered the World, Facebook Conquered Harvard

Books

• The Facebook Effect by David Kirkpatrick
  • After reading the first chapter I'm guessing this book is going to be a slog. He seemed to be trying to stretch it out, he doesn't seem very technologically sophisticated, and I didn't get the sense he'd been able to gain the confidence/friendship of his subjects so they would open up to him (like Michael Lewis is so good at doing). It seems like it's going to be nowhere near Founders At Work or stuff by Michael Lewis.

Questions

• Q: Why weren't the people at Harvard using Myspace or some other social network to connect with each other?
  • A: Because Facebook's appeal was specifically that you could find out about the people going to your same school.  There was no easy way to do this with the competing platforms (Myspace, Friendster, etc.).
• Q: What exactly was Zuckerberg's reasoning re: his rate of expansion? Was he just worried about being able to scale up w/o problems? Or were there other considerations?
  • A: It seems there were a lot of competitors at the time, so I think he was probably just trying to grab as much of the market as possible, knowing that whichever site had the biggest network would probably 'win'.